In 1955, an historic conference of newly independent African and Asian countries was held in Bandung, Indonesia, to promote economic and cultural cooperation and affirm opposition to the old European colonialism and any new colonialism by the superpowers. Six years later, the NAM as an organization was established on principles similar to Panchscheel at a summit in Belgrade, led by Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Nasser of Egypt. African, Asian and Latin American leaders agreed their countries would cooperate in exerting political pressure to ease Cold War tensions and stimulate economic development. The NAM did not and could not reflect socio-political systems of its members because they were heterogenous, defining its novel collective approach to world peace but also allowing its membership to include oppressive states under military regimes in no way internally peaceful. Soon forming a majority in the UN Assembly and representing a majority of the world’s population, NAM countries proposed and passed resolutions calling for the independence of all remaining colonies and declared the 1960s a “decade of development” to be backed by global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in theory not practice free from Cold War motives. As it became clearer that increasing numbers of supposedly non-aligned states were now superpower satellites, and disparities between quickly and slower-developing nations became evermore acute, the Bandung’s spirit of collective unity dissipated. By highlighting the possible benefits of one world, many peaces, the NAM also underscored its challenges.
Disputes arose at NAM summits and a splinter group of 77 states, the G-77, was formed to pursue limited, definite economic aims, such as fixed commodities prices to boost economies of developing nations, but its result disappointed. A G-7 of developed states created a counter-organization whose aims were similarly one-sided. Another NAM offshoot, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), tried using the growing reliance of developed nations on oil to influence world affairs in favor of developing nations. Culminating collective efforts was a UN proposal for a New International Economic Order in which NAM nations would play greater global and regional roles. A resolution to this effect was passed in the Assembly, but in response the US refused to pay its UN dues and the resolution was unimplemented. By the late 1980s, the paradigm of harmonized, coordinated development the NAM had originally offered as an alternative to discordant Cold War militarism had become polarized on a hemispheric North–South line, along which debts due to developed from less developed countries turned into instruments of control. What the NAM and its offshoots achieved, if indirectly, was heightened competition between developed nations for the benefits the markets and products developing nations had to offer, though with little concern with welfares of their populations. Within NAM nations, this competition tended to amplify rather than overcome structural violence and all but ended the use of violence between some of them.
If the NAM, NATO and the WPO were stages upon which their underlying paradigms of world peace played out, the UN was the theater. Formed a year after the Second World War at a conference in San Francisco, its purpose was essentially to prevent a Third, and by this standard it has so far triumphed, though it did not do so on its own. It could not do so by its design coupled with the Cold War conditions in which it was born and raised, only one of which has changed. The unequivocal terms of the UN Charter’s preamble outlines its goals:
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.17
How the UN surpassed the League of Nations and made many contributions to world peace becoming more of an actuality is explored below. But its victories and losses in peacemaking may make more sense by first explaining three of its inherent limitations, easily distinguishable from its problems then and now. For example, problems during the UN’s formation included the roles of regional organizations, and it was agreed that they could be agents of settlements and enforcements. Another was the status of treaties of outside origin, and it was agreed that they could be registered with, ratified and amended through the UN. Still another was the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, and it was agreed that it would be voluntary but only on a compulsory basis. In contrast to these problems the UN’s limitations were also extensively debated but inadequately resolved because they have added to difficulties of completing its intrinsically difficult missions.
One limitation the UN shares with its defunct predecessor is a self-inflicted inability to take independent action from its member nation-states, stemming from a self-perpetuating total dependence on the wills of and support from them. Of course, this limitation was a practical impracticality since there were no other wills and support to depend on since this was, after all, a United Nations, but it was also an outgrowth of longstanding principle. A second limitation of the UN it shares with the Westphalian System is the inviolability of state sovereignty, to the point that historically nearly no violation of peace of any kind within states has been reason enough for the UN to intervene without governments’ permission, even when governments are responsible for the violations. The rock and a hard place between which this limitation puts the UN is understandable, as doing so would call into question the basis upon which its members exist and therefore its own existence, a position perhaps impossible to get out of. The third and last limitation to be mentioned here is the veto powers of the “Big Five” permanent members of the UN Security Council, the US, Britain, France, Russia and China, also the largest arms-producing nations in the world. The most contentious issue by far in San Francisco, delegates from the other countries contended, was that veto power would render the Security Council powerless if one of its members became a menace to peace and that they could act in their own interests regarding matters between non-Big Five nations. The Big Five gave other nations two choices: either accept the veto or forsake the UN. They chose the former, and within years their prescient nightmare came true within their magnanimous dream.
The Security Council was designed to be the UN’s primary decision-making body with regards to the preservation of international peace. Composed of the Big Five permanent members and six temporary members elected by the General Assembly on an equitable regional basis for two-year terms (increased to ten in 1965), non-member nations may also participate in Council discussions affecting them upon its request but may not vote. The Council is continuously in session and one of its members’ delegates must be present at UN headquarters in New York at all times in case of emergency, measures aimed at improving the League of Nations’ slow response time. Article 33 of the Charter, dealing with “Pacific Settlement of Disputes,” states
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.18
If a member nation fails to comply with this or other peace-preserving provisions, the Council is empowered to investigate the infringement, make recommendations, and to enforce political and economic sanctions or use voluntary member-state force to uphold the Charter. By the letter, then, world peace was to be maintained one conflict resolution at a time.
The Council passes Resolutions in two ways. In cases of disputes between nations, any nine votes of the Council suffice; where peace has been breached or is threatened, the nine votes must include those of the Big Five. The latter mechanism embodies the Big Five veto, which has often prevented peace-related Resolutions from being passed, as when France and the UK vetoed measures to resolve the Suez Crisis (1956). Since the Council’s inception, the veto has been used five times by China, 18 by France, 32 by the UK, 81 by the US
and 122 by the USSR/Russia. Reasons have ranged from blocking admission of new member states to the UN to refusing to issue statements against aggressors based on politico-economic interests. During the Eastern European revolts against Soviet rule in the 1950s and 60s and wars for independence in Northern Africa in the 1960s, the Big Five sometimes based their vetoes on the Charter’s clause stating that the Council may not intervene in internal affairs of member states. In other cases, the Council has decided to intervene in the internal affairs of countries to promote intra-national peace upon their request as during the Greek Civil War, and has imposed sanctions aimed at the removal of structurally violent intra-national policies, as against apartheid in South Africa. However, abstentions have not always been considered vetoes, as when the Council went ahead with its planned operations in Korea, led by American armed forces, even though the USSR was then boycotting the Council. Yet despite Cold War frictions, the UN did achieve a number of its peace-oriented objectives when the Council failed, thanks to the Assembly.
The Assembly, in which all member states are represented, was intended as a deliberative and advisory body, but like the office of the Secretary General it soon developed the capability to circumvent Council deadlocks through its agencies. For example, in 1950 the Assembly passed a Uniting for Peace Resolution asserting that it may take action on peace-threatening issues if the Council is veto-paralyzed. Thus, although Britain and France used vetoes in the Suez Crisis, they heeded Assembly calls for cease-fires and troop withdrawals. Pursuant to the Charter, it may discuss and make recommendations on peace, security and UN operations issues except if they are not under Council consideration, then only upon its request. In 1948, a committee headed by Eleanor Roosevelt presented a Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserting “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” passed unanimously by the Assembly.19 Today comprising 192 voting members and non-voting observer non-governmental organizations in a wide variety of fields, aside from the unparallel international forum it provides, the Assembly has also initiated studies and sponsored agencies on human rights, economic, political, education or health issues affecting its member states, vastly improving on the multi-pronged approach to world peace pioneered by the League of Nations, beginning with disarmament. One world, many peaces were thus also to be achieved by simultaneously actualizing each of their components.
The Assembly’s first resolution dealt with atomic power, not yet used when the UN was formed, creating the Atomic Energy Commission to abolish atomic weapons, which it has not, and to ensure that atomic energy would be used only for peaceful purposes, which it has. A year later the Assembly further resolved to regulate to reduce all weapons, for which the Security Council convened the Commission for Conventional Armaments. Within five years, all the Big Five except China had growing nuclear arsenals, and China would a decade later, and it became evident that the two Commissions’ proposals were being systematically rejected along Cold War lines. So in 1952, the Commissions were united in a comprehensive Disarmament Commission of five USSR-aligned, five US-aligned and eight non-aligned nations charged with drafting mutually acceptable treaties for monitoring, controlling and eventually eliminating all militaries. Significant progress towards disarmament was made in treaties of which numbers of signatories continue to increase, generally along with the size of their militaries. At the Assembly’s First Special Session on Disarmament in 1978, the Disarmament Commission increased to forty members and a periodic Conference on Disarmament was initiated. The Special Session produced a Final Document consisting of a Declaration of Principles, a Program of Action, and Machinery for Disarmament, guiding lights of contemporary demilitarization efforts. With the Final Document, every UN member state became part of the Disarmament Commission as an advisory body, and the Conference became the single multilateral negotiating forum on the issue.
While delegates in San Francisco openly approved of disarmament, most were just as openly opposed to granting the UN legislative powers to enact or enforce international laws, putting it in binds, because they would impinge on state sovereignty. Instead, the Charter allows the Assembly to initiate studies and make recommendations for “encouraging the progressive development of international law and its codification” without the power to enact or enforce them.20 The International Law Commission (ILC) was created in 1947, which unlike many other UN bodies is composed exclusively of field experts, not necessarily Assembly delegates. As the International Military Tribunals at Tokyo and Nuremberg headed by Allied jurists prosecuting Axis officials were winding down, the ILC published its Principles of International Law based on their charters. In them were legally defined in detail for the first time in history:
Crimes against peace: i. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; ii. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i); and
War crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, devastation not justified by military necessity.
The ILCs takes progressive development mandate to mean “the preparation of draft conventions on subjects which have not yet been regulated by international law or in regard to which the law has not yet been sufficiently developed in the practice of States.”21 Its mandate of codification is taken as “the more precise formulation and systematization of rules of international law in fields where there already has been extensive State practice, precedent and doctrine.” Within these frameworks, the ILC has produced an extensive body of research. But the Assembly’s inability to enact or enforce their findings or recommendations is, to stress the point, among the primary weaknesses the UN has inherited from the League of Nations, which no longer exists.
Post-conflict peacekeeping is, in contrast, an area in which the UN greatly surpassed the League, but again only when the Council and Assembly have taken concerted decisions and the conflicting parties have agreed to cooperate. Since 1945, over sixty missions have been carried out by the UN’s peacekeeping forces, recognizable by their light blue helmets, which have also negotiated 172 conflict-ending settlements. But a distinction must be made between diplomatic peacemaking that must be well underway before peacekeeping forces under UN command can be deployed. In other words, without a peace treaty or other accord already in place, there is no peace for the UN to keep, which is why peacemaking always precedes peacekeeping. Early UN operations make this distinction clear and intimate how the organization works. Days after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Indonesia declared independence from its wartime occupiers only to see its pre-War colonizer, the Dutch, attempt to regain control. Two years into war, the conflict was brought to the Council, which called on them to end hostilities and enter arbitration. They agreed and an international Consular Commission of diplomatic observers from six neutral states was sent to monitor the peace that had thus been made. Fighting resumed a year later, so the Council replayed its peacemaking role by arranging another ceasefire. With only sixty-three “military observers” working at any one time, neutral zones between the conflicting forces were defined and implemented, and supervised troop withdrawals were complete in months.
This first, unofficial UN peacekeeping operation demonstrated limits and potentials of post-conflict intervention. It and many other post-Second World War conflicts originated with imperialism, as does one of many peaces that have yet to be fully kept. After the Second World War, Palestine and its rapidly growing Jewish population were still a British colony. On Britain’s request, the UN created a committee t
o review and make recommendations on decolonization, which proposed partitioning the territory into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem as an international city. Despite fierce protests, the Assembly voted the plan into effect and by 1948 civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs was raging. On the day Britain announced its withdrawal, Israel declared independence. In less than a week, the civil war escalated into an international conflict. Several UN ceasefire calls went unanswered and a truce was finally reached. To oversee its implementation the Council created the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), the first official UN peacekeeping operation. Showing initial promise, UNTSO kept the peace but only for a month due to support constraints and the unwillingness of the parties to cooperate. After a week more of fighting, a second truce was reached as talks for a new peace plan began. When the UN mediator was assassinated by Jewish radicals in September, negotiations fell through, and war resumed by October. In December, the Assembly formed the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which facilitated Armistice Agreements (1949) between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, respectively. The Commission also held a conference that formally ended this Arab–Israeli War, though no final territorial agreement was reached. The ongoing conflicts in the region, still monitored by UNTSO, can be traced back to these events.
The fact that this UN peacekeeping mission is also its longest-running testifies to the determination of the early organization to overcome the impotence of the League of Nations and its ongoing commitment to seeing them through. The fact that the conflict has yet to be resolved makes evident the magnitude of the problems the UN is willing to tackle. The UN now recognizes UNTSO as its first peacekeeping operation, but the term “peacekeeping” as an umbrella term also covering peacemaking and peace-enforcement only gained currency after the Suez Canal Crisis. In 1954, the US and the Britain withheld funds for a Nile dam when Egypt bought arms from Soviet satellites. In retaliation and need of revenue, Egypt nationalized the Canal halfway into 1956, and England, France and Israel invaded. The US sponsored a Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Britain and France vetoed, and the US brought the matter to the Assembly. Under a Uniting for Peace measure, the Assembly called a ceasefire, successfully negotiated by Canadian foreign minister and later Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. He proposed a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) to secure the ceasefire, supervise troop withdrawals and patrol buffer zones along armistice lines, which became a model for future UN post-conflict operations. For this proposal, Pearson is considered the father of modern peacekeeping, which still seeks to secure one world, many peaces one peace at a time.
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